Gradually, the group of anxious parents shrank and was gently ushered to wait in a back room in the old brick firehouse around the corner from Sandy Hook Elementary School.

I can't imagine who would do this to our poor little babies.

The sounds of cartoons playing for other people's children came from another room, but this room was hushed. A police officer entered the room and put the parents' worst fears into words: Their children were gone. The wails that followed could be heard from outside.

Scores dead in Connecticut school massacre

The wails sounded the end of a horrifying shooting that took the lives of 20 children and six adults in the school.

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It was about 9.30am, when the school locks its doors to the outside world, demanding identification from visitors. What happened next sounded different depending on where you were in the school when a normal school day exploded.

Pops. Bangs. Thundering, pounding booms that echoed, and kept coming and coming. Screams and the cries of children ebbed, until there was only the gunfire.

Countless safety drills learned over generations kicked in. Teachers sprang to their doors and turned the locks tight. Children and adults huddled in closets, crawled under desks and crouched in classroom corners.

Laura Feinstein, a reading support teacher, reached for her telephone. "I called the office and said, 'Barb, is everything OK?' and she said, 'There is a shooter in the building."'

"I heard gunshots going on and on and on," Feinstein said.

Even in the gym, the loudest room in any school on a given day, something sounded very wrong. "Really loud bangs," said Brendan Murray, 9, who was there with his fourth-grade class. "We thought that someone was knocking something over. And we heard yelling and we heard gunshots. We heard lots of gunshots."

The shooting finally stopped. Most teachers kept the children frozen in hiding. Some 15 minutes later, there was another sound, coming from the school intercom. It had been on the whole time. A voice said, "It's OK. It's safe now."

Brendan, in the gym, said, "Then someone came and told us to run down the hallway. There were police at every door. There were lots of people crying and screaming."

Run to the firehouse, the children were told. Shut your eyes and keep them shut and run. The Sandy Hook Volunteer Fire and Rescue station house is just down Dickerson Drive from the school.

Outside, a nightmare version of the school was taking shape. Police officers swarmed with dogs and roared overhead in helicopters. There were armored cars and ambulances.

Inside, the librarians and children had been hiding in the closet for 45 minutes when a SWAT team arrived and escorted them out.

Word spread quickly through the small town. At nearby Danbury Hospital, doctors and nurses girded for an onslaught of wounded victims. "We immediately convened four trauma teams to be ready for casualties," a spokeswoman, Andrea Rynn, said. Nurses, surgeons, internal medicine and imaging specialists, as well as staff members from pathology and the hospital lab,rushed to assemble in the emergency room to receive an influx of patients from the shooting. An influx that never arrived. Only three victims came to the hospital. The rest were dead.

"I've been here for 11 years," Feinstein, the teacher, said. "I can't imagine who would do this to our poor little babies."

Another nurse who lives near the school hurried to the scene. "But a police officer came out and said they didn't need any nurses," she said. "So I knew it wasn't good."

Survivors gathered in the firehouse. Parents heard — on the radio, or on television, or via text messages or calls from an automated, emergency service phone tree — and came running. In the confusion, there were shrieks of joy as mothers and fathers were reunited with their children.

The parents whose children were unaccounted for were taken to the separate room, and a list of the missing was made. The pastor of St. Rose of Lima Church, Monsignor Robert Weiss, saw the list. "It was around, obviously, the number that passed away," he said.

The Reverend Matthew Crebbin of Newtown Congregational Church was there, too.

"It's very agonizsng for the families, but they are trying to be very meticulous," he said. "But it is very difficult for people."

A woman named Diane, a friend of a parent whose child was missing, said a state trooper had been assigned to each family. "I think there are 20 sets of parents over there," she said.

In another room of the firehouse, there were the oddly joyous sounds of cartoons. There were plates and pans of pizza and other donated food. No one touched it.

"There was a multifaith service with people sitting in folding chairs in a circle," said John Woodall, a psychiatrist who lives nearby and went to the firehouse. "And after that, people milled around and waited for news."

Outside, reunions continued. News, good and bad, was borne on the faces of the people around the school. Three women emerged with their arms around the one in the middle, protecting her. "We just want to get her home," one said.

A few minutes later, a mother and father practically ran past in relief, a little girl in a light blue jacket riding on her father's shoulders.

15 Dec
Reporting from Newtown, Connecticut, US correspondent NIck O'Malley says many residents are banding together, hours after the second-worst school shooting in US history took place in their home town.

15 Dec
US President Barack Obama wiped away tears and struggled to compose himself on Friday as he mourned the dead in the Connecticut school shooting, and promised "meaningful" action to stop gun tragedies.